12/16/2019

Map of Shark Attacks

How do people feel about sharks?

  • Big teeth
  • Sharp teeth
  • Jaws theme
  • Bad movies
  • Big teeth

However, they’re important, and endangered.

  • Many are predators that control the food chain effectively.
  • As some become endangered, these ecosystems can fall out of balance.
  • This can cause degradation and a reduction in important species to us.
  • Conservationists have been working to preserve sharks, but have to work against this negative image.

Why the bad image?

  • Jaws is the mass-media start of sharks being scary ocean monsters.
  • Shows like Shark Week have romanticized shark attack stories.
  • Overall, sharks are mostly associated with shark attacks.

Questions

  • How frequent and bad are shark attacks?
  • Also, how do journalism articles cover shark attacks?
  • The Global Shark Attack File has records of shark attacks and links to sources.
  • This project will focus on the United States, between 2010 and 2019.

Number of Attacks

  • There are also some shark “interactions”, not just “attacks”.

Fatalities by State

Map colored by injuries

Infrequent, but still not the best

  • Lacerations are scary and can happen pretty frequently.

Media Analysis

  • In this presentation, I’ll compare two groups of articles.
  • Two are about bad attacks in 2019 and two are about bad attacks in 2010.
  • They’re short, so I’ll analyze them in pairs.

Sentiment comparison: 2010 and 2019.

However, let’s look closer.

Compare to Conservation Group.

What does this mean?

  • Shark attacks aren’t frequent, but a lot of the injuries are still bad.
  • When covering a shark attack, the focus is on the injury, which makes the shark seem scary.
  • The conservation article seems to be even more focused on the injury than the news.

What can be done next?

  • To improve a shark’s image, covering them outside of shark attacks may be the key.
  • Analyzing more shark articles not focused on shark attacks can provide an interesting point of comparison.
  • Additionally, analyzing and comparing these factors to countries like Australia may provide a lot of insight into other nation-specific factors of these effects.

Thank you!